1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to interactive events with a plurality of participants communicating through a communication network. In particular, embodiments of the invention provide a computer program, a method, and a system for participating in an interactive event, such as a massively multiplayer game.
2. Related Art
Interactive events, such as electronic games, or video games, often involve multiple players playing the same game. To participate, the players may utilize a computer, or similar console, with a keyboard, a mouse, a joystick, or other game input. In some situations, the players may be geographically isolated from one another and thus may communicate with each other and/or a server through a communication network, such as the Internet. In traditional paradigms, all of the players may connect to a server, which monitors the game. The network through which the players communicate with the server has inherent delays or latencies. There are latencies both when the players communicate with the server and when the server communicates with the players. Furthermore, the latencies may be different for each player and may vary with time or activities on the network. Scoring of the game generally depends on a player's response time to actions of the game, with the highest score usually granted to the player with the shortest response time. The latencies of the network may interfere with fair scoring of the game. Not only do players receive the actions on their computer or console at different times, but also the responses to the actions are transmitted back to the server with different latencies. Thus, the player who receives the action the quickest and has the lowest latency in transmitting a response may be awarded the highest score even though his response time may not be the shortest.
In other paradigms, players may play a game by communicating with one another in a peer-to-peer setup rather than a client-server setup. In addition, a massive number of players (in the hundreds to even thousands of players) may play a game at the same general location generating a large amount of bandwidth. Generally, the activities of each player are broadcast to every other player. An issue of concern is the amount of transmission bandwidth, sometimes known as upstream bandwidth, each player has. In contrast to the client-server setup, wherein each player typically only transmits to the server, each player has to transmit to every other player in the game with the peer-to-peer setup. Usually, Internet service providers (ISPs) provide users with much lower upstream bandwidth than downstream bandwidth. For players with low upstream bandwidth, the peer-to-peer setup could be problematic. For massive numbers of players, even a large amount of upstream bandwidth could be problematic.